3. Today’s
agenda
Key facts on mobile news : Who, when,
where and why
How is mobile affecting publishers?
Mobile and social – perfect marriage?
What formats work on mobile?
What next?
Q&A
15/06/2016RISJ Digital News Report 2016 3
5. 5
Growth of smartphone news use
SELECTED COUNTRIES
Year-on-year smartphone for news growth shows no signs of slowing down. Smartphone news access higher than
computer access in Switzerland, Sweden, and Korea.
7. Increased centrality
RISJ Digital News Report 2015 7
32%
say smartphone main way of
accessing online news
53%
amongst under 35s
68%
of those accessing news on
public transport
51%
distracted when watching
TV news
8. 8
MAIN DIGITAL NEWS DEVICE BY AGE (UK)
Younger users prefer smartphone news access, older users prefer either tablets or the computer.
9. RISJ Digital News Report 2016 9
24% 16%
UNITED KINGDOM
12% 17%
UNITED STATES
First contact with news (in the morning)
10. RISJ Digital News Report 2016 10
24% 16%
UNITED KINGDOM
12% 17%
UNITED STATES
First contact with news (in the morning)
11. Mobile and social work together
15/06/2016RISJ Digital News Report 2016 11
13. USA
1. APPLE NEWS: 4%
2. FLIPBOARD: 4%
3. SMART NEWS: 1%
AUSTRALIA
1. APPLE NEWS: 4%
2. FLIPBOARD: 4%
3. SMART NEWS: 2%
Mobile news aggregators
Selected countries
New mobile aggregators like AppleNews, Smartnews and Flipboard are
far behind Facebook in terms of reach and importance.
15. Brexit vote (BBC traffic)
Source: BBC
0.0
1.0
2.0
3.0
4.0
5.0
6.0
7.0
8.0
9.0
12am 3am 6am 9am 12pm 3pm 6pm 9pm 12am 3am 6am 9am 12pm 3pm 6pm 9pm
Millions
Hourly Unique Browsers to BBC News Online
Tablet
Mobile
Computer
Thursday 23rd Friday 24th
Between 6am and 7am on Friday, 80% of global visitors to BBC
News Online were on mobiles and tablets.
16. New internet peaks at the FT
New digital prime
time Most journalists file stories
New products
Source: FT audience research
19. People use fewer sources
on smartphone
70%
have a news app installed
on their phone, only a third
actually use them in a
given week
RISJ Digital News Report 2015 19
1.52
Average sources per
person on smartphone –
significantly fewer than on
a tablet or computer.
Strong brands that provide breaking news or other strong
utility do well but have to earn place in
attention economy
20. Proportion using a news app on smartphone or tablet
SELECTED COUNTRIES
Use of news apps has grown in many countries since 2014.
Q11. Thinking of the way you looked at news online (via any device) in the last week , which of the following ways of consuming news did you use?
Showing code for any app use
21. 21
Mobile news alerts have seen the biggest growth in Austria where they have doubled in use.
Increases also in Ireland, Japan, Denmark, Turkey and Brazil
Proportion who arrived at news via a mobile alert
SELECTED COUNTRIES
22. ALL COUNTRIES
Less than 1% in both the US and
Europe use smartwatches for news.
Of those that do use news, push
alerts seem to be more popular than
going directly to an app.
News use via Smartwatches
24. 15/06/2016RISJ Digital News Report 2016 24
Short form dominates, but long form works
Source: Pew Research/Parse.ly
25. 15/06/2016RISJ Digital News Report 2016 25
• Screen size has doubled in
last five years
• Average is now over 5.0”
• Bigger devices lead to
more browsing
• 45% of iBooks are now
read on phones
How much difference does screen size make?
27. 27
Power of distributed video
• Vertical
• Square
• Automatically playing
• Immersive (360)
2015 saw the video enabled
Internet rivalling television
news as the most compelling
and authentic destination for
live news.
28. 29% of video
viewing time is vertical
More vertical and square
video is on the way
Video is changing, vertical, square, round and
interactive
29. Texted vs non texted in top Facebook native videos
Source: Analysis of top videos provided by
NewsWhip, February 2016, n = 303
29%
71%
0% 20% 40% 60% 80%
Non-texted
Texted
30. Emotional vs factual in top Facebook native videos
58%
42%
0% 20% 40% 60% 80%
Emotional
Factual
Source: Analysis of top videos provided by
NewsWhip, February 2016, n = 303
32. 32
1. Notifications as new battleground
“We used to be standing on a hill and shouting messages at people, [but now]
there’s a growing number of users who only engage with us when we send a
push”
Andrew Phelps, Product Director of Messaging and Push, NYT
33. 33
2. Faster mobile pages
• Google’s AMP moves to next stage
• Proprietary approaches like Instant
Articles
• Publishers add lazy load and reduce
advertising
• Ad blocking software like UC browser
All this puts huge extra pressure on publishers and will
push further to distributed models
34. Mobile was winning
“It’s perfect for the train,
elevator, grocery store line,
or wherever you have a
spare moment to catch up
on the news”
“It’s an ongoing conversation
about the news, sort of like
texting”
3. Bots and conversations
36. 36
5. Rise of Virtual Assistants
Google, Microsoft, Cortana, Alexa and now Facebook M
ZERO UI
Over time over time
more of us will talk to
applications rather than
touch them
38. Recap and
discussion
points
Smartphone is becoming the defining device of
the digital age
Formats and interactions will be different in a
mobile environment
Social media and mobile go hand in hand
It is even harder to get attention on mobile for
news (and harder to make money)
15/06/2016RISJ Digital News Report 2016 38
I’m Nic Newman from the Reuters Institute for the study of Journalism at Oxford University – we look at media systems across the world with a particular focus on Europe. We publish range of research about news consumption, how technology is impacting journalism and what publishers are doing about it.
Today I’ve going to talk specifically about mobile and I’ll draw (mainly) on data from our annual digital news report (came out about a month ago) based on survey of 50,000 in 26 countries , also refer to report on online video including mobile video and trends and predictions report at the beginning of the year (all these and more available from publications section of our website)
Today I’ve going to talk specifically about mobile and I’ll draw (mainly) on data from our annual digital news report (came out about a month ago) based on survey of 50,000 in 26 countries , also refer to report on online video including mobile video and trends and predictions report at the beginning of the year (all these and more available from publications section of our website)
And in terms of today’s agenda
I’ll run through some of the key data points on mobile news, who is consuming it, where and when are they consuming it, how fast it is growing
Secondly talk a little about how this is affecting publishers – again a lot of that is when and how people accessing differently
Thirdly I’ll address the relationship between Mobile and social which is critical and will become more so in the future
I’ll talk about formats including video but also extend to which long form text work on mobile or don’t
And then I’ll have a stab about how mobile might develop over the next year or two …
Q&A
So this is the general picture over the last four years in some of the biggest countries we look at. Around 50% now on average using the smartphone for news. But some countries Korea, Sweden Switzerland are now mobile majority with more access via a smartphone than a computer/laptop combined – way ahead of the US or the UK
So this is the general picture over the last four years in some of the biggest countries – around 50% now on average using the smartphone for news. But some countries Korea, Sweden Switzerland are now mobile majority with more access via a smartphone than a computer/laptop combined – way ahead of the US or the UK
Just drilling down in a bit more detail at the UK we can see how things have changed … can see news access from computer down, smartphone up, and tablet also down (not necessarily where we thought we’d be a few years ago when tablet billed as saviour of the news industry) – many people finding that they don’t need tablet and bigger screened smartphones
And when we ask people about MAIN usage, the device they rely on most – we can see that the smartphone and tablet together have overtaken the computer. We have passed the tipping point in the last year.
Overall we have seen the smartphone becoming much more central over the last few years, the defining device of the digital age – because of it is always with you and is personally addressable.
A third of us in total and over 50% of udner35s say it is the main way in which they get news
In terms of news on the move 68% use the smartphone at least once a week, far more now than a than printed newspaper, and then even at home when watching the TV news over half of us say they are regularly distracted by a mobile device – principally surfing the web, answering emails or using social networks
Here is the demographic breakdown in a bit more digital and it is quite interesting – see smartphone use for news driven by under 45s whereas tablet usage is largely computer replacement for over 45s
This year for the first time we also put the smartphone on context with other platforms such as radio, TV, print as well as other internet devices. We asked people this year about what they do first thing in the morning, where they get their first news. Just comparing radio people do a lot in the UK 24% with smartphone 16% get their first news this way. In the US the smartphone is already well ahead 17% compared with just 12% for the radio.
But then where do people get their first news when they are on their smartphone? Going to apps websites, aggregators, email?
What we see here in the US = 48% by far biggest chunk goes to Facebook and Twitter, 15% going to aggregators and just 23% to website or app
And in the UK, slightly different picture – websites are much stronger, a lot of that is down to the BBC – but still here one third get first news from Facebook or twitter by scrolling the feeds – and that rises to almost 50% for young people.
So what this speaks to is that fact that how people access news is different on a mobile device
This chart looks at the relative importance of branded entry/direct entry and social media across computer, tablet and computer and can see that when using a smartphone they are less likely to go directly and more likely to use social media. So distributed content and the move to smartphone go hand in hand
In terms of which social networks, people use. As we’ve seen already Facebook is most important across all devices with 44% now saying they use the network for news, 10% for Twitter. The majority of Facebook usage is now mobile like access to news sites but we are also seeing the emergence of chat apps that are purely mobile such as whatsapp, Snapchat though these are generally not used very much for news
Snapchat discover we asked about specifically this year and surpised to find only 1% in the UK, though 40% using it for news.
We’ve also seen growth of a number of other distributed news platforms specifically for mobile – such as Apple News, Smart News and Flipboard, Nuzzell which has been going for a while and are used by professionals. But again we were surprised to find that they are not very heavily used. In general population only around 3%, a long way behind Facebook and other social networks.
So that is consumer view, moving on to a publisher view of all this … How has this changed what they do and what they see in their data. Majority of publishers also now report the majority of visits are coming from mobile and for many majority of time spent too
One recent topical example from the BBC log files after the Brexit vote gives a really interesting insight into what is happening. So the biggest traffic day, the busiest period ever happened 6-7 see that 80% using smartphones to access the news, waking up and accessing from phones, also see no point at which computers account for more than 50% - very different from a few years ago.
This is a chart taken from the log files of the Financial Times – not around Brexit – but shows how there has emerged – in the last few years – a new prime time for digital (etc)
And here is a chart from the Guardian (from 2014) looks at traffic by platform. Two things interesting from this – one shows how desktop was complementary to newspaper readership. Only when smartphone came along that digital really replaced the printed newspaper because it started competing in terms of that morning reading time
And then secondly that late peak for the tablet, reminds us that tablet is used primarily in the home as an easier way to get online.
Apps or mobile web? We’ve done quite a bit of work on this over the years and the answer is not obvious. The first thing to say is that it is much harder on a mobile device to grab attention because of all the other things you can do:
What we find is that 70% of people have installed a news app weekly but only around a third use an app each week – so the real problem is getting people to open it or go directly to a new brand as we saw earlier
The other aspect of this is that people tend to only use 1 or 2 brands on a smartphone (av 1.52) each week while they use much more than that on a computer or tablet. I suspect this is because when you are short of time and on the move, you tend to come back o the site you know and trust if you are going to go directly to a mobile news site.
And in the UK we find that the BBC seems to be the anchor brad with around 50% saying they used it regularly. Fox in the US, Abc in Australis and Spiegel some of the brands doing well elsewhere
Generally app usage has grown as mobile usage has grown but still only around 30% use an app in an average week, majority of traffic and usage tends to be for mobile web. The other thing we know about people who use apps is that these are your loyal users, much more interested in news, much more likely to go to a destination, older, more male.
The key point here is not either or, apps critical in my view as somewhere to create habit but mobile web, distributed media is where you are going to acquire new users.
The other reason why apps are becoming more critical is the growing importance of notifications which is easier and more effective in app driven world – (going back to my earlier point this will enable you to alerts loyal users to stories that you know they might be interested in
This chart just shows how much more important this area is becoming, has become over the last few years.
The problem of course is getting you to install the app in the first place
And just a word about wearables and watches – currently only around 1% or less are using a digital watch so the market is pretty small, obviously not a great reading experience but in terms of news usage the main value that owners say they get is in the alerting functionality – so news alerts first and then sports alerts and weather. Very few people are using apps.
Ok another key question is what content works on smartphones – been a feeling that people don’t read articles or long articles on smartphones and that may have been true in the past but over last tend years mobile screen sizes have doubled with much of that growth coming in the last two years with the growth of phablets and larger iPhones. So I think it is pretty clear that this makes a difference and that people do read longer articles now on smartphones
This is the best recent research on the subject from PEW suign data from over thirty news sites in the Parsely network, just in the US, but it shows that the majority of content accessed is short form (defined as under 1000 words), rather than long form but that the numbers of people who access long form on a smarthphone is the same, article for article people not less likely to access a long form article.
Another piece of research I think is really interesting from the Erikson mobility report looks at time spent per content format and per screen size and shows that form most content types a big screen size means biggest usage.
If take video see how much screen size matters and how usage grows when get to phablets and tablets, but for general browsing which is the next one you can see that the new 5 and 6” and really the perfect size, as screen size gets bigger usage drops as it gets less accessible – and those effects specially true for communication and social networking where portability becomes more important
In terms of mobile video, we’ve obviously seen a huge explosion in video and offsite video in particular over the last year with autoplay but also just the amount of news video that appears within the experience of both Facebook and twitter.
Much of this is designed for consumption on mobile and indeed shot of mobile phones. if you take the Paris attacks last November see examples
Don’ t think it is too much of exaggeration to say that the video and mobile enabled internet started to rival twenty four news as destination for live news.
As I mentioned this is changing the aspect ratio - Mary meeker did an analysis which showed that of all video watched TV and mobile 29% is now watched in a vertical aspect ratio (on mobile) and that is up form 5% just a few years ago – so not too fanciful to suggest that
Our research of the top 300 social news videos in Feb 2016 shows that the majority of video is now texted to make them work for smartphones when don’t have sound on and for a social format.
We also find that the majority of video is now consumed offsite through social media and that this is even more true for those using mobile phones (because of the amount of social media that is used) - and in terms of the content it tends to be short form and it tends to be emotional rather than factual. This is more nature of social media rather than mobile
So these are some of the formats and approaches that are working so far about what about the future. I think there are four things that I would highlight.
TREND 1 >>>>> As the fight for attention on a smartphone become more and more intense we are seeing the growing importance of notifications - the art of pushing the right content to the right person at the right time
and that’s partly driven by new functionality greater payloads from Apple for example – but we’re also seeing big beast like Facebook trying to seize the opportunity – Notify which has launched in the US is new form of aggregation trying to filter and control access to notifications.
Publishers on the other hand are trying to build their own strategies in this area. Like NYT moved beyond news with this Harper Lee – as a way of drawing people back to distinctive content and have a whole team now focussing on this area – how to get the balance right, how to use data to work out what to send and when
TREND 2 >>>> Secondly recognition that the mobile web hasn’t worked very well and so we’re seeing huge effort on all sides to speed things up. Initiatives like Google AMP frameworks being adopted that load instantly is part of the battle to keep mobile web free against more proprietary efforts by Facebook, Snapchat and others and then publishers belatedly realising they need to do more and then finally new browsers that include ad blocking already become bery popular in India and other parts of Asia that block ads by default to give people a faster and better mobile experience
Good from consumer point of view, bad from publisher point of view as it makes it even harder to make money.
TREND 3 >>>> A third trend is the growth of messaging as content (as with the quartz app) … So Instead of trying to impose our linear articles and videos on mobile users, how can our content fit into their patterns of behaviour, into their conversations. Again that requires some different skills and some different thinking – but will be a key part of the future. (as you can see perfect for public transport, grocery store queue)
I love the way this graphic shows the place they’ve come from and the place they might go to next on the phone. (if you’ve seen the New York Times chat bot for the elections this is the same idea)
TREND 4 >>>> So mobile moments and quick interactions will be important but so too will be more immersive media. This links with the growth of VR and AR. News providers have been experimenting with this over the last year NYT sent Google cardboard holders to 1m loyal subscribers so they could view new VR content through their android smartphones which just slot in… and looking to experiment around the US election and the Olympics in RIO .
Facebook and YouTube already support 360 enabled video out of the box and that in turn will drive more 360 content from entertainment and from news.
And then finally we’re going to be hearing a lot about personal assistants. So far only about a fifth of us use then but they are getting better all the time and the tech platforms are starting to use them. Google, Microsoft Cortana, Siri , Amazon with Alexa and now Facebook with M messenger
The big implication of this is moving from multiple screen to zero screens – we’re going to be spending more time talking to applications rather than touching or clicking – so Zero UI is going to be a thing and that may benefit audio and other formats that we haven’t even thought of yet.
So just to recap on the main issues and trends relating to news
Smartphone is becoming the defining device of the digital age – because it is so flexible and it is always with you
Formats and interactions will be different in a mobile environment, visual journalism, scrolls, swipes ultimately zero UI
Social media and mobile go hand in hand – working out how to use distributed platforms to reach new people as well as get existing customers to come back more often
It is even harder to get attention on mobile for news (and harder to make money) but it is competing for your time with entertainment and Pokemon Go and all the rest of it – so the real issue is how can attract attention in the first place and create habit on mobile phones which is where apps and destination websites come in
Happy to take questions on any of the above.